the narrative is elliptical in a way i wouldve loved to chew on like 10 years ago ... but i'm old now and insensate and respond only to sensory inputs like color and sound. luckily this game is full of weird crunchy noises and gross textures in addition to a cast of morose lesbians who look like fanart of themselves. If everyone is gay i think ... no one is gay. i have so much patience and LOVE for proudly tedious, unreconstructed survival horror mechanics!!! the loop here is finessed just enough; you'll come upon puzzle solutions naturally as u explore new rooms, but it's also exhausting to find the item you need with a full inventory and the nearest save room half the map away :))))) a masterclass in what i think the kids call "filtering" ...

also happy to see a game that doesn't bother with delicately alluding to other art (subtle intertextuality ... that thing videogames are famous for); it just plops it in front of you whole-cloth. the silent hill save screen and meat world slop are really obvious, all the classical pieces & cosmic horror texts, but the use of the böcklin painting "isle of the dead" is especially canny — he painted a handful of versions (plus a cheerier follow-up "isle of life"), there are several potential IRL inspirations, it was widely proliferated in his home country ... its so thematically relevant girl!!

Control Valve Companion

CW: Transphobic Discourse, Bad Relationships, Alcoholism, Brief Mention of Suicidal Ideation

Venus Meets Venus (2014) is interesting in the fact that it feels like such a specific cultural object from 10 years ago. It's interfacing with a greasy and failed relationship of a cis lesbian dating a transwoman, 10 years ago. Basically in a time period where talking about that stuff was still out of bounds. Shockingly its hard to believe this, but for transwomen being spoken of in a large cultural group as these 'objects to have strong opinions on' didn't really catalyze until about 3 years ago with J.K. Rowling posting her (J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues) [https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/] (2020) essay.

So this whole discussion is a major sidebar but hear me out before you skip this paragraph. The important thing you have to know here is that even me interfacing with this post now would be dumb if we are just talking about Rowling and what shes doing. Sadly¹ the best reference point to make that point is that of a youtube video by detailed independent journalist Shaun over in the video "JK Rowling's New Friends" (2023) in which among lots of other things he points out that Rowling has some fairly extreme ties to the gender critical movement and the ways in which shes shaking hands with ultra conservative figures and supporting their desires to see shelters for trans people actively closed down. In most ways this concern trolling about Rowling being 'maybe not the worst for saying what she said' is completely out of date by design, and Shauns coverage in general points that out. Most news coverage is not like 'hey its no longer about what these people are saying, but what they are doing' because transphobia gets more clicks. This is not just Rowling specific by the way, there was a similar issue going on with the treatment of Dave Chappelle actually. Chappelle has been getting that similar concern trolling treatment all throughout the bookending of his own transphobic specials, which as you know pulled the Netflix development team into striking for a while, all the up to his most recent special. I don't even think its worth either of our time for me to go and find the name of those specials and talk that stuff out, because Chappelle being bad about trans people is literally not that important (and I'm saying this as a transfemme). You know what is important? When the dude threatened to block a housing proposal at a local commitee by pulling out a lot of money. That's actual horrifying news but that doesn't get clicks! It's the biggest deal about Chappelle to me, and a blip on most peoples radar. This is the problem, for most people everything exists on the level of a few words said wrong and not on the level of actually bad stuff happening.

This is what I mean, most of this stuff I just mentioned is literally out of date in the sense that a metric fuckton of cultural movement and politics has been happening even since then. It's only been Three Years since that particular event, and if your trans like me this probably comes as a shock, for us with all the stuff going on it feels like 10. So I can't sit here and show you all the awful shit going on in the world with that. That has to be something you learn about somewhere else, not from a random post on a wimpering social media website like this. But importantly, it puts into context why Venus Meets Venus is as culturally important as it is, its from 2014. The dynamics were more innocent, and most people thought that the only 2 things trans people were worried about was the trans panic defense and online TERFs. Even here Venus Meets Venus functions as a fracturing point actually and a rather important one, it illustrates through being so well written that relationship issues are a huge problem to. Even then we had a lot of terrible stuff we were dealing with, but we didn't really know about it like, statistically or whatever.

See the more 'economic' side of this was uncovered in "He Fucked the Girl Out of Me" (2022, Talyor McCue) which needed a bunch of statistics about how transfemmes have the harshest wage gap of any gender group we have census data on, and the trans panic defense needed to wear off a bit. Back in 2014 we just had 'feelings', really sapphic and confusing feelings about 'others'. If Venus Meets Venus shows anything then, its that through the thoroughness of its prose and broken bar relationship that being a 'good ally' is not being a good person in a relationship. There's a very profound passage where the main character asks her partner if she wants to go to the trans march, and she politely declines. It immediately becomes this prodding 'why' moment, you went to the dyke march after all and frusteratingly as a reader you're never given a 'good' reason as to why not. What would it have been? She passes, does she not want other trans people to see her as clocky? Does she not want to be 'seen'? Is she worried that she might be murdered by police or something? You're not really given an answer, nowadays she might have had one, but in that time period, in 2014, no was just all there was unless you were especially educated about the windows being broken and I mean come on, I was out in 2014 and the main thing I was thinking about with my crush on a homeless transfemme. Coercing your girlfriend into doing stuff they doing want to do, and pecking them into activism for their minority group more is not ok, and through the main narrator you learn that. It hits like a truck.

Thus in a beautifully put way you learn one of the most important struggles that LGBT people face: we are made the victim fairly often of other peoples maladaptive enthusiasm and have to watch ourselves about falling into it with each other. Maladaptive enthusiasm is the main theme of the work, and it hits like a truck. For me if I had to describe it, its basically the concept of loving somebody through your desire to 'help them out' and get them out of a rough spot. You other them as an object of political desire rather than romantic thoroughness. A desire for active and continuous solidarity that can rather franticly overwrite your other emotions and desires. For instance I had an extreme crush on my now transmother who was going through a housing crises at one point. I get her some basic nessecities from CVS once and shipped it to her, and obviously it put me in an emotional spot where my crush on her was getting toxic and out of hand. I was messaging her constantly to make sure she was ok, would actively tell her my worst intrusive thoughts, etc. which catalyzed into an event where I upset her by saying I was thinking about offing myself (this is years ago, I'm fine now). Demanding an intense emotional care from somebody who was in no place to give that. Soon after that happened, I realized I was trans myself and thats how I came out. This is actually the most chill version of this I can publicly talk about, in part because we have such a powerful and loving relationship now without the need for active check ups. This didn't happen immediately. I had to go take a year smoke break with myself and take a really long look in the mirror.

This acts then as the ultimate criticism of the piece. You can hurt people and have a point of healing happen with them later on, but the way this work frames that is as something that happens over a single night with a wine bottle and some tears. But especially once you do something outrageously hurtful (as is revealed in this text) you can't just cry it away. You need to take inventory of yourself and walk it off for a year or two. It's on this same note that I want to say that I'm not that far from becoming other peoples political projects rather than just as a person with some demons I'm fighting. For instance I tell most when I first meet them that I'm a transwoman, but I keep the fact that I'm plural and an alcoholic behind the teeth. Especially that second one. Because the moment people hear stuff like that they feel catalyzed to make a decision 'about me'.

Do I make this person my 'project' or do I discard this person as a result of these factors being 'too demanding' to put up with. Yet, I do everything in my power when these facts come up not to make it other peoples issues. This work operates as a tragic example of how barrelling into this way of thinking about us does us a disservice and dehumanizes us and allows you to act more vile. I would say this is a very necessary warning story, with an albeit awkward reunion note I don't agree with, and since it depicts a time in which trans people weren't a constant fox news paranoia, its actually worth playing through at some point despite this blunder.

Recently I've been opening up to people in the city I live about these other facts, and they still proceed with love in their hearts towards me with adjacency and not active doting. This powerful form of love, a love via adjacency, is likely necessary in order to build healthy relationships with people. I think we should help each other, but the political projects should happen on the street level, and not through courting. Highly recommended work of fiction, and extremely empowering to the concept that relationships for LGBT people can start out normal, but if you can overcome the occasional edginess of this text (for instance the 'counting chapter narration openers' for each section) there's a powerful few things to gauge from underneath. In a way, I think this text is a lot less about queer mistreatment, and a lot more about how bar romance seem to be the mecca for maladaptive enthusiasm, and even if you don't find time to play it (its only about a half hour read), it's best to try and actively keep suspicion of that pronged understanding of others in your life. Communicate your barriers and take inventory of your emotions when you can. Don't toss people away just because they have 'problems' c:

You should not be reading this if you are under the age of 18. Minors please skip this one!!

EXTREME CAUTION CONTENT NOTICE: Discussion of Transphobia and Queerphobia, Criticisms of Feminism, Non-Consensual Fantasies, Bestiality, Child Molestation, Objectification of Women, Exhibitionism, NSFW, Discussion of Autopsies, Critical Literary Theory, Cringey Hypotheticals, Morality Speculations, Also Really Dry

Est. Reading Time: 34 Minutes

I want to hope this is worth reading to somebody, because I feel like I paved a way to talk about porn games that goes beyond just kink shaming or pop feminist argumentation, if that sounds useful to you then good luck to you.

For a long while now I've been longing to write about Adult Games, because quite honestly I have a bone to pick with a majority of the people who discuss erotic art. Even when the targets of the ire seem reasonable, I tend to notice there is quite a lot of kink shaming and puritarianism in this space. For example in the lambasting of Nekopara, a peer I respect ConeCvltist (note I'm not trying to 'call them out', many people including me have been complicit in this behaviour, the fact nobody could articulate what im about to say is more damning of all of us really) goes on to say the following

"What this means is that Nekopara's catgirls are the "idealized woman" for the target audience: a walking fleshlight in the shape of an girl, who has an innate attraction to the self-insert main character and will basically never reject them. A mirage of a character who only exists for pleasure."

This is point blank just kinkshaming, because it implicates that the idea that petplay and catgirl aesthetic is infantilizing to women. I doubt ConeCvltist had any reason to be considerate of this, but a logical conclusion could be drawn that petplay kinks turn people into fleshlights that are only 'idealized women' for men. This echoes the opinion of the radical feminist, which which the feminist reading of a text is usually articulated with. The further implication that radical feminists tend to draw from this is that if this is an 'ideal' archetype for men, then women should strive to be the opposite and avoid playing into male pleasures entirely, thus women must unshackle themselves from kink, and never look back, essentially to put the collars and flogs down. I wouldn't blame you if you were reading what I just said and had all sorts of alarm bells ringing off, in fact I want to dare argue this is exactly part of the problem. While its usually taken as a given that Radical Feminists are transphobic, anybody who makes a criticism of feminism is immediately categorized as a calling card for 'antifeminism' (AKA: meninism, mens rights advocacy, conservatism, sexism, etc.) but let me just show you that this is the case with a short quote:

"Our enemy is the Establishment-its laws and institutions. S/M not only does not share a common enemy with us but longs to be recognized as part of the essence of the power structure that is our enemy." - Ti-Grace Atkinson

The book I pulled this from is an 80s text called 'against sadomasochism' which is a collected manuscript of radical feminists throwing their two cents on why BDSM is oppressive and constraining, and really reflects a desire at the end of the day to reasset liberal power under a slightly changed framework. Thus this ideal of the 'catgirl', one that even billionaire aparthaid sexist Elon Musk has been meming about needing to exist, the stereotype in anime that needs to be seen to life, must just be a reassertion of male fantasies.

The rub, though, is that fantasies and sex based characteristics have very little actually in common, besides the genetalia you are sensually familiar with, and in fact a lot of people who play eroge games or dating games (a similarly maligned genre) could and often are women. The only reason they may not be moreso is due to systemic repression of sexual or romantic preferences. I hope you can see where I'm going with this so that we don't to spend all of our time stunlocked on why its important to go beyond just kinkshaming shit: if trans women are women and they are, then their sexuality does not reflect some 'essential masculine' (ie 'predatorial') urge. If we can admit that most of the population of romance shlock like 50 Shades of Grey is ciswomen, then Trans women having more 'hardcore' versions of BDSM fetishes is if anything more liberatory of repressive valves on sexuality, not less. Or at the very least, you would have to admit that both fantasies are on an equal playing field and not really to blame or repress at all. 50 Shades of Grey at least to me seems like a repressive work that can't fully complete what its trying to articulate, at least to my way of seeing it, I don't know about you.

—--

To be against Sadomasochism and the intensity of it is not to be simply against what's happening inside the San Franciso Armory, its to be against Marquis de Sade, and Sacher-Masoch.

To keep an english lesson short, de Sade was known for using extreme sexual scenes in order to criticize power but also fulfill urges. Most of de Sade's depictions are actually quite metal. For example 120 Days of Sodom, which was written in a prison cell, depicts all of the jailers as fucking hideous and unclean people. It's a nasty text, and some of the degradation certainly was there to titilate but on the meanwhile there were more simple pleasant BDSM threesomes in works like Julliette. De Sade used it to criticize power, but also peer into the degrading pleasure that can come from objectification. This is a tension quite literally at the core of fiction as fiction is in itself the 'mirage of conciousnesses' but mechanically pressed to respond in specific ways to specific inputs. Fiction objectifies humanity itself, and the Sadist sees a continuing immersion to be found from that objectification rather than being taken out by it. The Sadist lives in the paradox.

The masochist lives typically for the pleasure that comes from others seeing them and taking that 'paradox' out on them. That's where sacher masoch comes in, the one that wrote Venus in Furs and desires to be stepped on by his mistress. It'is worth mentioning that eroticization is primarily all found within being desired anyway. Sadomachoism doesn't really work unless the 2 groups get satisfaction from each other. The Sadist isn't getting pleasure from being anonymous or perceiving, thats what the Voyeur is for, those who like seeing things happen in front of them with little personal ability to interface. The Sadist is getting pleasure from being percieved as the dominatrix humiliating the other person. Sacher Masoch and Marquis de Sade did not know each other or have a sexual relationship, so when we talk about this we are talking more about sexual perceptions and the subjectivity of the focalized character. To expand on this point, let's spend a paragraph meditating on the Voyeur.

—-

In all of my years of playing games the only game where I felt so effectively powerless in order to be registered as voyeurous is the game Presentable Liberty, you can read more about that here if you want but the simplified version is that its a game where you are not allowed to do anything but witness as everything falls apart around you, locked in a 4x4 cell with passionate letters from characters you never meet pouring in to console or persuade you. What's important here is that this feeling of voyeurism is actually intended in this particular work. Contrast this to the typical use of Voyueristic as a dismissive or derogatory term, like in dating sims for example. In that the voyeurism usually comes out of literal peeping tom attitudes of the character your piloting, but also a feeling that most of the decisions are happening without your desire or permission. That it's something happening on behalf of a protagonist you typically don't care about. For example if you found out the player character was a peeping tom then its likely that you would have a lot less sympathy for them as anything but an avatar that occasionally acts outside your locus of control for the purposes of continuing the story. This is usually not that big a deal in gaming immersion, for example in the Half Life series there's a player character that handles the action and then a Gordon Freeman who handles the protagonist's motives and the ability to digest information from the right people during those interactive cutscenes. People are able to juggle this cognitive dissonance comfortably until it comes to 'taboo' art like, dating games, eroge, etc.

—--

I think this can be used as a way to understand both kinkshaming and the certain puritanical political censorship its connected to. People feel uncomfortable when the character they are behind does something immoral and so they explain it away by demonizing the supposed demographical ingroup that it belongs to and trying to not see that such art ever sees the light of day. The other reason people act like this is because their own sense of boundaries of what is and isn't fictional start to feel dissolved and they start getting very scared about what is allowed to be depicted.

Originally when I started writing this, I thought my argument was going to be one of obvious blunt Libertineism. Such that, "Lolita, 100 Days of Sodom, etc. should have already solved this moral panic conundrum" that we should know that depictions of rape, pedophilia, necrophilia, beastiality, tourture, and all the other fucked up shit under the sun can happen in fiction because we already had it 100s of years ago and nothing came of it and such gross texts like Lolita were not really intended to be gotten off to anyway. In actuality though there is a shred of truth in this consideration that is actually worth taking pause to think about.

Let's leave aside the obvious hot button version of this for a moment, that of Lolita, and consider a fictional depiction of beastiality. I'm not trying to be edgy but these depictions already exist called the The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, in which an octopus covers itself all over a women, and is meant to be one of the first points of reference for the slow popularization of tentacle rape. Now you have a lot of others, bugs, horses, dogs etc. all drawn taking a person in dojinshi now. But the anxiety, and one that I can almost sort of understand, is that you genuinely dont know if this came out of a dark copy. Which is to say was the Dream of the Fisherman's Wife made from a clear enough insight into what a woman fucking an octopus looks like? Do we know for sure that a living or dead octopus was thrown over a naked women in order to try and get a sense? Nevermind if people getting off to these drawings are really using it as a valve for their real life sexual desires for the creatures, but is the original drawing something that was constructed from the blueprint morally? If the octopus was dead first would that make a difference, it would surely, but would it then be moral? If it was just taking a real octopus fucking another octopus, is that moral. Going off of that idea, is animal planet showing sex moral? Is that not the exploitation of animal sexuality which has supposedly a chance to scar children anyway?

Maybe we can get closer via exaggeration. Is it any more moral if they artist never saw a naked woman, or a real octopus, but saw 2 of them as paintings elsewhere? Is it moral then? Surely thats moral but that drawing of a woman and that octopus have original inspirative reference copies somewhere. But then I can still not guarantee that this art was made within those reasonable moral bounds. I can be fairly sure, but I can't prove it a shadow without a doubt…

This I believe is one way in which the moral heart of censorship probably exists, not so much as a worry of consequence but a worry of origins and their knock-on imitation effects. But I find the standards deeply bullshit, because in order for art to maintain a perfect moral cycle the origin versions would have to have been stopped. If you don't want depictions of mass shootings in art, or animated, etc. You should have seen to it that mass shootings never happened. If you didn't want to worry about animal exploitation then you should have prevented animals from getting hurt. Because none of us individually can change the wounds of the past that caused this stuff we take our anger out on art instead and hold it to this extreme standard. Of course this doesn't prevent art from never being stopped due to obvious immorality, like for example if somebody were to dox a private address in a game, that game should not be allowed to be seen or distributed and should be stopped at all costs, and the origin of such a 'mistake' would be obvious. But for fictional art the attitude is guilty until proven innocent by a moral mob who thinks they are more concerned with potential consequences than actual origin. This matters a lot because we actually don't know if Marquis de Sade engaged in non consentual BDSM or not. Allegedly he took a maid and dripped hot wax on her against her will and that was part of his conviction but we dont know if that actually happened or if it did how much his being able to see and partake in that played into a scene. And the last and perhaps most important reason its bullshit: None of us on earth can be held to concrete morality. We all leak things we shouldn't and do things we shouldn't. For example speaking ill of family members we don't like which could cause them to be traced I think something we shouldn't do but in a world with such low levels of privacy we don't think twice about venting about that on social media half the time.

—--

So now that we have some theory and speculations about censorship and Libertineism, I can actually talk about the fucking game and its problems and use this essay as a launch point for talking about erotic games in general with no compulsion to self defend against charges of particularly 'predatorial' sexual drives. One last thing first: If you thought this was exhausting to read, you've started to understand the issue we are dealing with. This extreme necessity to defend against accusations of fictional sex drives and the objectification of women by Petplay and BDSM is quite literally the power imbalance Transphobia and Queerphobia thrive on. Cis people do not have to explain and defend missionary, 50 shades of Gray, or their exalting literary classics with erotic influence.

—--
Now onto the game proper, do you remember those archetyped terms I brought up earlier, the idea of tying Masochism, Voyeurism, and Sadism to character subjectivities? I can sort of talk about where this game is becomes awkward.

Princess Trainer is part of the "Trainer" genre in which your goal is to basically pimp out a person or group of people into being more slutty by sending them to work increasingly Frivilous jobs and wear skimpier clothing, degrading them from their initial abilities into a public humiliated sex objects. Princess Trainer in particular has you doing this for Jafar from Aladdin, in which you pimp out Jasmine into a reviled whore that Jafar can marry and have as a personal concubine, with you being able to enjoy her plenty as well as she gets corrupted into this other person. Importantly then none of the issues with the game are to do with 'ruining childhoods' or 'objectifying a woman' because within the fantasy this is more or less the goal. To corrupt from the high chair and watch her come to desire you and everyone else on the way down. What better a subject to choose than a disney princess, who is both voiced by and depicted as a 'chaste' yet oddly sexualized adult for family friendly entertainment. If there's any neutral subject for corruption a disney princess is honestly not a bad choice, this is one point that game has in its favor.

Where it begins to lose points, and is honestly why I wanted to talk about this in the first place, is both its game design and distraction away from an effective sadistic fantasy. For one, the course of the game happens over the span of several months and mostly happens through you choosing what job she has to pick and send her to the 'academy' to suppress her will to accept these jobs each day. However, large parts of the games content are locked behind poorly defined Quests. For example I was spending my first run monotonously pressing the same buttons for her to go to the fruit stand until I could buy her more clothes not recognizing that a Quest I had to fulfill would only have the prompt show up if I had 50 gold. Large progression of the game and its content was hidden behind these esoteric questlines and generally bad UI. As a result a lot of the game was spent fiddling around and monotonously pressing the same 3 buttons until I could notice a change somewhere on the map. Just so you understand how bad that is, that town I was fiddling with was 1 screen large with like 6 different single click single use buildings and I was still having these problems constantly.

There's a type of enticement that can be held through this monotony but this is where the immersion started to take a hit. Since there was no clear tutorial, I thought in order to degrade Jasmine I had to build her up into 1 act at a time. Holy mother of Moloch was I wrong XD

What ended up happening was I 'maxed out' total acceptance of an act causing serious tonal whiplash because Jasmine would start giving him flirtatious eyes and swooning during the handjob only to freakout and say 'you disgusting scum' for the first blowjob, she would still do it but the fact was that she hated it and so despite Jasmine having her 'obedience' meter maxed out she was still upset with me, from the standpoint of immersion this makes no sense and these scenes should have been skipped or parceled earlier on. But since there is no active indication that her meter for acceptance of an act was full, I was just getting this weird tsundere treatment the whole damn game. This didn't make me feel either sadistic from the perception of the player character or masochistic from the perspective of fantasizing that what was happening to Jasmine would happen to me, because I knew in both cases these inexplicable tonal variations were just the lulls of the narrative from a poor UI leering its head rather than any consistent explanation in the game of erratic attitude shifts.

To add on this is that there was a complete acceptance of being called and applying to herself any pet name like 'Bimbo' or 'Pet' etc. after a certain point in her training at the academy. In fact, you could put in your own. These inclusions were actually really hot because it allowed me to directly input the niche petnames I like, and allowed me to bring my own kink and roleplay into the confines of the story, but it only went on to striate this surrounding experience with the game when she totally accepted this name and role but out of character got feisty over the next thing she was told to do.

Then we come to the other issue, so Jafar demands 3 things from you that are supposed to happen, make Jasmine personally obedient, humiliate her to the public so everyone hates her, and have enough money to pay for her and Jafar's wedding. Apparently the public humiliation portion of the game unlocks from a tab at your home, which you're unlikely to check or remember much. It's only those bits of UI similar to checking the advanced options menu of a game, so I had to look up to find out about it again. When I did not only was I met with whiplash, but I was also met with a part of the game I no longer wanted to be involved in. The public humiliation, walking somebody on a leash, is hot and a huge exhibitionistic drive in queer communities, no problem there. The issue is that because I had no way to decide how much or little happens in a scene, I had to sit through and read about CHILDREN touching and handling her breasts while my character agreed along to it. Out of the 9 exhibitionist scenes these were 2 of them, and the primary 2 that led to her reputation as a princess being defiled since she was called a child molester. Mind you the kids were not drawn shown touching tits but the scene of it happening with dialogue went on for some 300 words a piece.

This is reallydisappointing. Because in my mind the game didn't even have children in its fantasy to worry about at all to begin with, that was a non-factor to me. On top of this if there were kids in the narrative my player character would probably shake his fist and tell them to fuck off not just limply stand there and go 'yeah go ahead'. And finally, I was not given an option, a warning, anything that would happen. The rest of the exhibitionist portion reflected this problem immensely because it distorted the course of the story from a sadistic pleasure into a supposed voyeuristic one of watching her get degraded without character input, it was awkward and stumbled on its feet. In the sex scenes you had ample dialogue options to choose how the scene would turn out but there were none here. I don't need to make no fine point of it, even without the kids involved this was already a boner killer portion of the game since I was made a voyeur, with the contingent hope being maybe the last few scenes of her being hatefucked by a mob would be hot. But with the kids involved it caused a negative boner, my stomach kinda wanted to hurl and I couldn't trust the text at all anymore because I was thinking of the fictional leering kids in the whole of the fiction now. Just why, why did you have to go there??? You literally didn't have to!!

If I were to speculate, the reason why relates to a larger macro problem with the story which is that the writer couldnt come up with many ways to degrade her from the point of being no longer regal since it would theoretically require writing a bunch of chivalric vows that were being broken. I don't think it would actually be that hard but it would require more legwork than the child molestation shock value way to degrade her, presumably the indie dev thought it wouldn't make a big difference. I was under the expectation she would be degraded to a town fuckdoll, not a fucking child predator like jesus fucking christ! >:C

You might be wondering then why I don't have this game at a 1, on my 4 point scale.

It comes from 2 places, I don't hold a moral resentment with this sort of inclusion in the way others might, it just wasn't the set of fantasies of degradation I was expecting and the UI didn't reflect the ones that were there very well. I also think it just renders and satirical potential of corruption mute. There was a chance here to do glib critiques of the monarchy or chivalric expectations of princesses, but that was just left on the cutting room floor which is just lame because the criticisms of power add a lot to the sexuality. Continuing along that political course of reasoning, obviously you should not involve kids in real life actively into exhibitionist kink as that is child molestation but this has also in a way aged extra poorly since the public displays of kink and the fact children could bear witness is a sore point that would be on everyone's mind anyway. People wont let us wear leashes in public over fear of supposedly 'grooming children' and narratives like this only feed those flames further. That's not to say its not allowed to be depicted regardless but its by design alienating and there was no content notice for its introduction.

On the positives, the cyclical and frugalistic result of currency is criticized, but not more than you would get in almost any management simulation.

I also thought the 1 screen management simulation visual design and simplicity allowed for a serene monotony, the response time for the buttons I had to click for the management portions were fast enough that I could get through the day in about 15 seconds meaning it was easy to appreciate the slow decay while not getting immediate tedium. That immersion was nice, the dialogue box also had a neat tattered parchment look to it that I thought looked really neat..

The customizable attire and pet name options were really hot, and Jasmine's obedience training was hot too. Some of the house sex scenes were hot and had servicable dialogue even though they were typically way too short. Also the game wasn't overtly raceplay oriented or involved in racist descriptions which considering the arabian race of the cast is worth lauding since its unfortunately rare to have a porn game have a black character that isn't racialized. I also just really like corruption as a fetish because it activates a desire in my brain as a trans woman of kind of wanting to be 'corrupted' into a girl and seeing girlhood more as a fetish rather than anything 'actual' so I'm much more forgiving of flubs anyway. There is something here, but its bottom of the barrel and I would just say skip the Town Exploit scenes if you do decide to try it. Don't stick around for more than an hour or 2. Otherwise I would recommend games like Third Crises or Corruption of Champions although both have a more masochistic subjectivity where you play as the characters being corrupted, those both have much more consistent and sexy descents into corruption than this.

Concluding Soapbox

I hope this can serve as an example for how you can criticize porn games without resorting to pedojacketing, kinkshaming, or moral panic. I really am so exhausted with the ways in which porn games are outright derided by stuffy puritarianism. There's always going to be something objectifying about art because all characters in themselves are just a mirage of word clouds we identify to a subject we all agreed to make up for the sake of the story. This is not to say that culture, art, morality shouldn't be criticized. But I just hope that I've provided enough tools to find more tactful and less potentially alienating ways to do so. It's likely I will talk about more porn games as well that I actually like in the near future if I have time, you know since I popped the bottle upon already with posting this.

Song Accompaniment

I've only done one cycle using as many continues as I needed, but I'm already convinced this is one of the best titles of the year so far.

A bold stance, so how can I possibly back it up? Well let's start from the difficulty structuring. A lot of SHMUP fans make a big deal about how finishing a game with 0 continues is proof of 'mastery' of the shmup at the bare minimum. That's when you can then properly speak about the mechanics from the standpoint of effective design or not so of course I'm not there. However I do find myself rolling my eyes at this stance because it's an opinion that reifies away the blunt reason for this to exist the way it does in the first place.

See, in the logic of most SHMUPs be it the Cave games or the Touhou franchise, the principle design approach is that you run in with a set number of lives and learn the patterns, die in the process and generally improve. This is all fine and well, with how short SHMUPs are there's a point to be made that it's in fact the main appeal. However, just taking this fact on its face reads as deeply unserious to me: The genuine reason SHMUPs have a 'continue' design in the first place is absolutely to crunch quarters. The genre is heralded for their difficulty on the idea of continuing through failure so you can master it in the reset, but if you step back for a moment it becomes obvious that the reason it's like this at all is because of a desire to play into arcade nostalgia and life design with a certain commercial process. For whatever reason the genre never adapted to early home console life systems, thereby going through a modular difficulty through the accessibility process from there. It never 'tested' out of itself. The translation to how it plays now is fundamentally awkward. As much as I like most of the Touhou games for instance, I hate the raw feeling of play being halted by a continue moment, that 'halt' is literally there for the player to pull a quarter out of their pocket. In a post-arcade era this has been translated to relaxing and finding resolve but since that resolve is usually on the timer there's generally a sense of panic. This is where Magic Vigilante intervenes, offering a slew of difficulties alterations: a modular life system health system that doubles the starting health, stage select, and most crucially a checkpoint based continue system.

On top of all this the designer even openly notes on the Itchio page that "Default value is 4. If you are not particular, I think the maximum value is fine.) Please use it because it recovers to this value when you clear the stage." Thereby openly encouraging the player to play on easy mode and then scale up from there.

For instance it's clear to me how the trajectory of difficulty scaling would work from here, you would play on 9 health until you get good enough to do a no CC run. Then on 8, etc. This along with the stage select allows the player to treat the game less like an endurance test, and more like a rhythm game. This design structure has more in common with being able to practice different movements in the later Guitar Hero titles or Rhythm Heaven than it does with its other genre contemporaries.

That said, SHMUP experts would probably be quick to outline that this random itchio browser title is just the first game I happened to play that does this rather than the first to actually do so, and I certainly concede to that point in advance. However, there's a fair reason to fixate on it anyway: it has a nice domino effect on the power fantasy approach to the genre here. In my view, games that give modular difficulty and encourage playing on an easier mode encourage the treatment of their world and environment as a power fantasy foremost. With a genre all about the fantasy of overwhelming ballistic warfare and competency being built through twitch dodging complex attack patterns, it's a genre almost entirely built for that power fantasy, yet most safeguard it behind the endurance test and I have to admit that I at least, don't typically associate power fantasies with endurance. I'll cut to the chase and say the lo fi magical girl power fantasy is an adorable approach to the genre. The whole experience has you fighting other magical girls and various bunnies in the meantime. The pixelated visuals and simplification of the enemies as red blobs that shoot out red arrows help keep incredible visual clarity, meanwhile the urban street scroll backgrounds. God these backgrounds are beautiful, they are still pixelated but done with a higher level of pixelation than all of the foreground enemies and characters thus allowing for various scrolling effects to happen without being disorienting. It all comes together with grace, feeling like a hazy dream you'd expect from a Cardcaptor Sakura fan.

Finally I will touch on the play mechanics themselves. This is a horizontal SHMUP which admittedly is not something I play often just because they don't generally get recommended. However if I were to hazard why, its likely that having to keep track of bullet patterns horizontally requires more of your peripheral vision thereby filtering the players who already have good periphery already, or forcing people with weak peripheral vision to glimpse back and forth more putting them at a disadvantage. Whereas, vertical shooters have a much more intuitive sense of tracking since the movement of the eye up and down goes faster. Bullet Hell games in general cause a lot less smooth eye pattern movement in particular, that is to say the eye is constantly jumping between points and the points in a vertical space are far easier to intuitate than a horizontal one. I use the terms 'probably' and 'likely' here because I'm not in fact an eye doctor. However, if you want a hypothetical reference point to better understand what I mean, think of how Tetris is laid out, the blocks fall vertical right? Well we could just think of the 'gravity' of Tetris if the game was played sideways as being a game about 'magnets' instead of gravitational measurement. I think you would agree that this Horizontris would be a lot less easy to measure and account for especially if the screen to do so is very large. Less hypothetically I have tended to find that when I play Pacman it's easier to run away from ghosts vertically than horizontally because I can more easily chart my escape route.

The point of this rather strange illustration here is to point out that if this is in any case true it thus explains the vertical dominance in the genre. Therefore it stands to reason that horizontal bullet hells have to in some way justify it through the mechanics. This is where Magic Vigilante shines most then through its main mechanic: Slow down. You build up a slow down meter through beating enemies that you can hold and after a small delay will allow to to more discretely navigate the bullet patterns. If you hold for long enough, you do a powerful counter attack, but it eats more meter in the process. This slowdown actually lasts for a really long time allowing for the player to fully gauge and process the bullets behind the ones you're currently avoiding. On top of this the boss health bar is actually positioned in 2 places, on both sides of the screen allowing for the player to more accurately assess how much more they need to navigate the wave. Finally, the game fixes this through having a wide range of resolution options so you can make the screen smaller or larger to fit your needs. The result is that it allows for a great sense of playfulness that comes from horizontal patterns, giving the odd sense that you are 'squeezing' through the bullets rather than flying past them.

Combine that with an absolutely adorable enemy design, wherein the player is fighting Bunnies and Mice blobs as mini bosses, and a kicking Progressive Electronic Orchestral soundtrack, and I think you have one of the best SHMUPs staring you down in a while! In contrast to the unfortunately benign droll of this write up, the effect is far more minimalist and gorgeous than I let on. It's also far more difficult than I make it sound to. Give it a shot!

Kaze no Notam came out in 1997. 1997. That's unbelievable to me. I don't think I've ever seen a game so ahead of the curb aesthetically than this one. It feels straight out of late 2010s vaporwave culture, it's so cool.

And the game itself... just pure, relaxing vibes. Sure there's goals, but honestly the main appeal of this game is just floating around in your hot air balloon, basking in the glorious PS1 scenery, listening to the beautiful electronic compositions. It's just so beautiful.

Normally I'd wait to play more of a game to give my thoughts, especially one where you can't really "beat" it, but I feel so confident about my love for this.

was talking it over with a friend and we agreed that one of the smartest things this game does is to entirely elide questions of depiction and gratuitousness re: sexual assault and abuse by unfolding the violence almost entirely through threat, metaphor, and implication. the looming possibility is signalled by the very first interaction even, the encounter of our favorite skinny, vulnerable teenage girl Heather Mason with a bulking, growly strange man stalking her. the eventual unraveling of the "God" plotline obviously also scans as about sexual trauma, the violative experience of unwanted procreation without the explicit need for an assaulting figure (which of course ties into the parody of the Virgin Birth, again, not subtle but appreciated), and the central dynamic between Heather and men is defined by distrust, fear, and manipulation (the memo you read where even her benevolent father and blankfaced video game Good Dad Harry Mason confesses to wanting to murder Heather as a child is heartbreaking), while her relationship to the only other woman in the cast is defined by outright hostility engendered by their equally understandable if slightly manichean responses to unbelievable pain and suffering at the hands of a patriarchal and matriarchal figure, respectively. to really hammer it home the game pens you in to dark, cramped, filthy spaces right from the start, barely ever giving you an overworld to interact with: Heather Mason is not her father or James Sunderland, she's a 17 year old girl, railroaded through the terrifying world that the men of the series navigate more freely (this is also reflected in the games lack of traditional Silent Hill branching endings, at least on a first playthrough). maybe there's nothing interesting or new left to say about these games but i loved this so much i wanted to at least put something here to commemorate it